I
had a good day. My wife and I drove over to Comfort to check out the
many antique stores. We haven’t been since last spring. She looks
at antiques while I look at the used books. I found several really good
old nature books to add to my collection. I found one by Ernest Thompson
Seton, a first edition printed in 1901. He was one of the first nature
writers I ever knew of. When I was in the fourth grade, back in 1945,
my teacher’s read me stories written by him. He was a Canadian,
and the stories seemed very interesting and exotic to me. I was living
in Orange, Texas on the Sabine River near the Gulf of Mexico. I had
an opportunity to buy a book of his a couple of years ago, but I thought
it was overpriced, and I was not teaching nature writing at the time.
This book is in excellent condition. It is leather-bound and only cost
me $10, a real bargain. I also bought a book entitled N by E, written
and illustrated by Rockwell Kent, one of America’s leading artist
of this century. It is about a trip he took to Greenland. I would consider
it a nature book as well as a travel book. It is going into my collection
anyway.
It
was a really pretty day. The side of the road was green all the way
to Comfort. There was no water in most of the creeks, but there obviously
had been quite recently. One thing I noticed was what I didn’t
notice. A few years ago, there were many trees along the way that had
died of Oak Wilt. I didn’t notice any today, no new ones anyway.
I saw piles of old trees along the side of the road. Maybe no new trees
are dying. I hope that when the Oak wilt gets here that most of my trees
will survive. Since I live in the center of an Oak grove, I really will
be upset if my trees die. Apparently nearly all of the Live Oak trees
in central Texas are related through their root system and the virus
that causes oak wilt will pass in time from tree to tree until eventually
all the trees will be attacked.
Today
I mowed and knocked loose cedar stumps. I got rid of a bunch of stumps.
It was a good time to do it because of all the recent rain. Some of
the stumps were quite large. They were several years old and should
have been easy to remove, but they were hard. Cedar doesn’t rot
much. They are easier to remove than oak stumps, however. I did remove
one oak stump, a large one. It probably weighed thirty pounds. I do
not remember an oak stump of any size which I could remove. Most are
harder several years old than they were when the trees died. Most people
who talk about death and dying do not talk about plants dying. But if
all the oak trees are connected by one gigantic root system, can you
really talk about a live oak dying? Isn’t the tree still alive
as long as its root system is, and really each entity which we think
of as a tree is not really a separate tree. If one of these entities
dies, the tree has not died, just this branch of it. Just as I cut down
thousands of little oak branches today as I mowed, each of those was
in reality as much of a tree as the huge trees that shade my house.
Given time and sun, each one of them could have grown as large as they
had. But these are not individual plants, and I need to start thinking
of my trees as just part of a single tree that extends to my neighbor’s
property and my neighbor’s neighbors property, on through the
canyon to the next county. And somewhere over there, there is a disease
in my tree of many trunks, Oak Wilt. It is a virus, and it is on its
way. It will take a while, but the tree composite has it. Can the scientists
who are seeking something to fight the virus, something to heal our
sick tree, find it in time? This is important to me, for I am very fond
of this trees of many trunks which I have lived under for ten years
now
Of
the many things we can't control or have great difficulty controlling
are funguses and viruses. If we wish to work with, accommodate ourselves
to the natural forces about us, we normally prefer to select plants
that are native assuming them to be resistant to many of the funguses
and viruses present, or they wouldn't be here in the first place.
Such
doesn't always seem to be the case. On my property virtually every adult
Spanish Oak has some disease and is rotten at the core, on the way to
a premature death, just hanging on. These are native plants in their
native locale. New ones are growing and coming to maturity. I wonder
if these plants have always suffered from these diseases, have always
limped through life. Maybe they are less susceptible to disease in other
locales, when they are not growing on limestone hillsides, when they
are not in competition with juniper and live oak, when they have more
nutrients, more water. Maybe the diseases that afflict them are new
to the area.
The
Live Oaks in my area are now being attacked by a new disease. Maybe
I should have written "the Live Oak," for I have been told
by our county agent that what may appear to my eye as an individual
live oak is really just one of many sprouts from a common root system
covering much of our and neighboring counties. So essentially we have
one tree that has spread, invaded new territory with its suckers, sending
down roots through cracks in limestone, gradually covering county after
Central Texas county, with new sprouts, some growing into huge trees,
five and six feet around at the base, with multiple trunks, up to eighty
feet tall. Their acorns feed the squirrels and enrich the soil but do
not seem to be a means of reproduction for them.
Our county agent says that somewhere in the Hill Country around Kerrville
a few years ago the bark of a tree was skinned back leaving an opening
full of sap. Into this opening a beetle crawled to feed on the sap,
bringing with it the virus which we call oak wilt. The virus clogs up
the phloem and xylem of that sprout preventing the flow of valuable
nutrients, thus the sprout, however large, wilts—its leaves, growing
brown and eventually falling off. The sprout dies but the roots live
on, and with them the virus inexorably moves on, at about one hundred
feet per year, to the next and next sprout. The root system seems to
have no defense against this killer. It continues to throw up new sprouts,
which grow for a time, only to be overtaken by the same damming as the
more mature tree.
This
is a native plant, the kind that we think of as safe, as resistant to
the diseases of the place. This is the second most common tree in our
area, second only to its chief competitor on the limestone ledges, the
Juniper Ashe. Most people in Central Texas prefer the Live Oak to the
Juniper because it is not so invasive and doesn't drink up so much water.
When I moved onto my land, I could not walk across it for the many Juniper
limbs, dead and alive, that covered virtually every foot of the back
portion of my ten acres. The Live Oaks were there, some quite large,
but they were spindly and thinly leaved. They, along with the Spanish
Oak, the Cedar Elm and Mexican persimmon, were losing the battle against
the Juniper. And nothing else could grow beneath most of the Junipers,
for they grabbed every ray of sun and with their deep roots a large
portion of any available water.
I
decided to enter the battle on the side of the Live Oak. That was in
1985. At the time I had never heard of oak wilt, if it was then present
in Central Texas. I decided to keep the big Junipers, tree up the middle
sized ones, and cut out the young ones, thus giving other plants an
opportunity to flourish, giving me a place to build a house.
Working
alone, with inadequate tools, I have made progress on the task. I have
won some battles for the Live Oak and lost others. I may have a few
fewer Juniper, but I could never in my life time complete that simple
program without dedicating myself full time to it. In the areas I have
cleared, the Live Oaks have flourished, spreading wider, growing thicker,
taller each year. I have a videotape of the trees when I first began
to clear, and I look at them now and I cannot believe how they have
change. They form almost a complete canopy of shade now, along with
a few elms and the remnant Juniper. Once again it is difficult for grass
and wild flowers to grow beneath them.
I
like the shade. It keeps me cooler, well less hot anyway, in the Summer.
I like to see the slant of sun in the early morning and late afternoon
on the leaves.
So
I have fought for the Live Oak, freed them from their bondage, allowed
them to grow. And now their killer comes. Their root system is no doubt
connected to the sick trees just down Hilliard road in Oak Meadows.
Maybe they will rename it the Meadows. Earlier farther down the road
the virus hit Thousand Oaks. They still call the area that, but it no
longer merits the name though a few oaks have so far survived.
What can I do for my trees? What should I do? The county agents suggests
some possible courses. One is trenching. People in some neighborhoods
have banded together to dig forty-inch deep trenches to separate the
root system in their neighborhood from the diseased roots. This is more
easily done in areas where there is soil to dig. Here on the lime stone
ledge, cutting even with diamond-toothed cutters is almost prohibitive
in cost and difficulty.
Another
possible course is to wait until the roots are infected and to treat
the individual trees with a chemical which will allow the tree, though
diseased. to continue to transmit fluids. The procedure does seem to
offer relief to individual trees for some years maybe as much as ten.
The chemical is expensive and with hundreds of trees the task is laborious.
So
we will continue to watch our Live Oaks. Meanwhile, I am glad I didn’t
cut out all of the cedars. Maybe, their roots will serve as a barrier
to the spread of the oak wilt.